Located less than a mile from Juárez, the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso is a non-collecting institution that serves the Paso del Norte region. ...In Curating at the Edge, Kate Bonansinga brings to life her experiences as the Rubin’s founding director, giving voice to a curatorial approach that reaches far beyond the limited scope of “border art" or Chicano art. Instead, Bonansinga captures the creative climate of 2004–2011, when contemporary art addressed broad notions of destruction and transformation, irony and subversion, gender and identity, and the impact of location on politics. The Rubin’s location in the Chihuahuan desert on the U.S./Mexican border is meaningful and intriguing to many artists, and, consequently, Curating at the Edge describes the multiple artistic perspectives conveyed in the place-based exhibitions Bonansinga oversaw. Exciting mid-career artists featured in this collection of case studies include Margarita Cabrera, Liz Cohen, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and many others. Recalling her experiences in vivid, first-person scenes, Bonansinga reveals the processes a contemporary art curator undertakes and the challenges she faces by describing a few of the more than sixty exhibitions that she organized during her tenure at the Rubin. She also explores the artists’ working methods and the relationship between their work and their personal and professional histories (some are Mexican citizens, some are U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, and some have ancestral ties to Europe). Timely and illuminating, Curating at the Edge sheds light on the work of the interlocutors who connect artists and their audiences.
Bill Berkson was a poet, art critic, and joyful participant in the best of postwar and bohemian American culture. Since When gathers the ephemera of a life well-lived, a collage of bold-face names, ...parties, exhibitions, and literary history from a man who could write "of Truman Capote's Black and White ball, which I attended as my mother's escort, I have little recollection" and reminisce about imagining himself as a character from Tolstoy while tripping on acid at Woodstock. Gentle, witty, and eternally generous, this is Bill, and a particular moment in American history, at its best.
This engrossing memoir brings to vivid life the behind-the-scenes struggles of Marcia Tucker, the first woman to be hired as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the founder of the New ...Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Tucker came of age in the 1960s, and this spirited account of her life draws the reader directly into the burgeoning feminist movement and the excitement of the New York art world during that time. Her own new ways of thinking led her to take principled stands that have changed the way art museums consider contemporary art. As curator of painting and sculpture at the Whitney, she organized major exhibitions of the work of Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Tuttle, among others. As founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, she organized and curated groundbreaking exhibitions that often focused on the nexus of art and politics. The book highlights Tucker's commitment to forging a new system when the prevailing one proved too narrow for her expansive vision.
This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, ...it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaboration, which can gloss over the complexity of identities and lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion by museums. Over sixteen chapters, well-respected authors from the US, Australia and Europe offer a timely critique to address what happens when museums put community-minded principles into practice, challenging readers to move beyond shallow notions of political correctness that ignore vital difference in this contested field. Contributors address a wide range of key issues, asking pertinent questions such as how museums negotiate the complexities of integrating collaboration when the target community is a living, fluid, changeable mass of people with their own agendas and agency. When is engagement real as opposed to symbolic, who benefits from and who drives initiatives? What particular challenges and benefits do artist collaborations bring? Recognising the multiple perspectives of community participants is one thing, but how can museums incorporate this successfully into exhibition practice? Students of museum and cultural studies, practitioners and everyone who cares about museums around the world will find this volume essential reading.
Charting a New Course Jones, Nathan C.
Collections (Walnut Creek, Calif.),
06/2014, Letnik:
10, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Curators in museums of all sizes are practicing their craft within a paradigm that in many ways seems at odds with the direction the museum field is headed. The future of the curatorial profession ...requires curators to shed stereotypes and loosen their grips on scholarly authority. This does not imply that curators should relinquish the roles of collecting, researching, and writing to someone who is not a subject matter expert—it simply means that a collaborative approach should be taken when developing collections and exhibitions. Front-end research, focus groups, social media, and interactives are great ways to gather ideas from visitors and can help explain what visitors know, what interests them, and what is relevant. Curators must redefine their function as subject matter experts and how they work on exhibit development teams. Lastly, in order to ensure the future of the profession, training, standards and best practices must change with the evolving nature of the craft.
Focuses on Alexander Dorner's curatorial reorganisation of the art collections at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover during the 1920s. Emphasises how his stage-managed environments changed the way ...visitors interrelated with the art objects by deploying atmospheric immersion and an evolutionary itinery. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Deskins focuses on the work by Judy Chicago entitled The Dinner Party and explains that her original methods offer a most proactive, critical, and approachable curatorial presentation, providing ...considerations for future research. Research on Chicago's The Dinner Party is abundant, focusing on the monumental table of thirty-nine place settings, each representing a woman who made some contribution to Western history. It was produced over a five-year period, from 1974 to 1979, with more than four hundred volunteers. Scholars have examined, praised, and criticized the installation, predominantly the sculptural table, from feminist and formal aesthetic perspectives. From Chicago's early innovations developing context through research, artistic experimentation, and creating a framework for honoring women's contributions to history, to The Dinner Party's contemporary display, the curatorial implications are significant.
Collections need curators Hamilton, James
The British art journal,
12/2018, Letnik:
19, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The tragic destruction by fire of Brazil’s National Museum is testament to the perils of cumulative government underfunding. Political ignorance of the purpose of museums leads to a careless lowering ...of their priority, and the willful reneging of government responsibility for these inexpensive but vital bastions of civilization. For reasons I find hard to define, museum people ceased to be proud to be called curators, or to realize the extent of the public’s respect for our profession. Let me tell you how it used to be, between 40 and 50 years ago.
In this paper, I will use the performance of Hope Coming On as a catalyst to talk about the relationship between hope and nihilism. These seemingly opposed concepts rely on one another, in a sense, ...for their meaning. If everything was perfectly wonderful with the world, we could not be tempted with nihilism. But we would also not need hope, which is the desire for something better. Alan White has proposed three stages of nihilism, which I will discuss by associating three kinds of hope with some examples from the literary arts. Change occurs eventually, if we continue striving. Despite the absurdity we may experience, we have to choose hope, if we want to discover any meaning in our existence. This performance illustrated the truth that art is one of the ways—an important way!—to instigate hope. Hopelessness is one theme of a painting about people being thrown into the sea, but the performance of Hope Coming On contrasts hope-filled voices in front of the sublime tragedy. Before entering the dialectic of hope and nihilism, I want to give a brief description of the performance that led to these reflections.
Curating Live Arts Dena Davida, Marc Pronovost, Véronique Hudon, Jane Gabriels / Dena Davida, Marc Pronovost, Véronique Hudon, Jane Gabriels
2018, 2018-11-01
eBook
Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global ...phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline. Reflecting the field's characteristic eclecticism, the writings assembled here offer practical and insightful investigations into the curation of theatre, dance, sound art, music, and other performance forms—not only in museums, but in community, site-specific, and time-based contexts, placing it at the forefront of contemporary dialogue and discourse.
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